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He put out his hand as if to seal a business deal. She regarded the hand solemnly for a moment, then placed her own in it, sealing the bargain.

“Agreed.”

They parted then, Den shaking his head at the twisted situation. I-Five had been the one to suggest he forge an alliance with Dejah Duare and now they had forged one—against him.

Plenty of nuance to savor there, if you’re into irony, he thought.

eleven

There was a certain amount of guilt in Jax’s concern for Dejah after the discovery of the light sculpture’s damping properties. He’d intended to talk to her directly after Rhinann had, but he’d been experimenting with the sculpture and hadn’t noticed her leaving the conapt. It wasn’t until he had satisfied himself in a small way that further experiments were warranted that he left Kaj meditating in his quarters and went looking for the Zeltron, only to learn that she had gone out.

“Did she still seem upset when she left?” he asked Rhinann.

“Upset?” The Elomin shrugged his bony shoulders. “I can’t honestly say. You know how Zeltrons are—they tend to be mercurial.”

“What was bothering her?” Jax felt odd discussing the issue with someone other than Dejah herself, but Rhinann had gone in to check on her …

Rhinann considered that for a moment, then said, “Well, as near as I can tell, she felt renewed bereavement because she supposed that her late partner was holding out on her—emotionally speaking, that is.”

“Hiding behind his creations.”

“Precisely. It made her realize, I think, that her understanding of her relationship with Ves Volette was fundamentally flawed. She felt … left out.”

“I hate to say it, but that may make her more inclined to let I-Five and me tinker with the mechanics of the remaining light sculptures.”

“Unless she’s now fearing that you’re going to hide behind them, too.”

Jax smiled wryly. “I hide behind the Force. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s the way she sees it. Well, I’m going to trust that she’ll realize it’s for the greater good.”

Rhinann merely tilted his head and shrugged.

Jax had turned and started for his room when every hair on his body stood on end. Something was happening within the confines of his room—something so anomalous he couldn’t grasp it. He had heard a blaster overload once—had heard the sound of it grow from a staticky buzz that made his teeth itch to a piercing whine that threatened to remove the top of his head. This was like that, but it was in his brain, in his bones, in his blood.

It was a buildup not of sound, but of the Force.

Jax leapt for the door to his room and flung himself inside. Kajin Savaros lay in the middle of the floor in a fetal position, hands to his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut, rocking back and forth while the Force built up within him like water behind a dam.

In all his years of training with Master Piell, in all the time he had been on his own, Jax had never encountered anything like this. He had no idea what to expect, no idea what to do. On the opposite side of the room the items atop his storage bench began to vibrate. Even as he watched, a hairbrush, a chrono, and a book of Caamasi poetry jigged their way to the edge and fell.

Jax was in motion again before they hit the floor, pushing the Force ahead of him as he dived for the writhing teenager. He wrapped Kaj in soft folds of the Force, projected soothing, velvet calm. Then he grasped the boy’s shoulders, his grip firm but gentle. He felt a backlash almost immediately—a kick like a repulsor field. He pushed back.

A bottle of depil cream abruptly cracked, its viscous contents oozing free.

“Kaj!” Jax said, then more sharply, “Kaj! What’s wrong?”

The boy let out a wail that penetrated all the way to Jax’s soul. “Alone … alone!”

Grasping at straws, Jax said, “You’re not alone, Kaj. You have me now. You have Dejah and the others. You have the Force.”

“The—Force—is doing this—to me!” The words came out in painful bursts, the anguish behind them breaking on Jax’s